Brownies and Kalashnikovs Read online

  The fallout, as usual, fell on the increasingly sagging shoulders of the Saudi subjects.

  Today the ulema and their Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice are wielding more power than ever over Saudi Arabia’s subjects in the history of the Kingdom. They prowl at every corner of every sidewalk and alleyway in Saudi Arabia except within the walled communities of the expatriates and Aramco’s oil towns. The muttawa’a make sure that no one (outside the royal family) drinks alcohol, gambles, commits adultery or mixes with unmarried members of the opposite sex, and (if you’re a woman) laugh loudly in public places. There are signs in restaurants in Jeddah that state clearly that qahqaha (laughter) is strictly forbidden on the premises.

  The sanctity of the home is no protection from the muttawa’a who have the license to burst in if they suspect mixed parties; they also climb into cars that have stopped at red lights if they suspect the couple inside are unmarried. The accused are hauled to jail where, more often than not, they spend at least twelve hours of degradation before being released if they are innocent. If the accusation sticks, then it is a public lashing and a jail sentence. Non-observance of fasting in the holy month of Ramadan means jail to the Muslim and deportation to the non-Muslim. For the four out of the five required Muslim daily prayer times that coincide with opening hours, shops must close down for forty-five minutes under the close watch of muttawa’a who patrol their assigned areas by rapping sharply on shop windows and often descend on any unfortunate male caught outside the mosque, shouting ‘salaaah’ (prayer).

  Unhappily, women are the ones who receive the brunt of the muttawa’a’s wrath. The muttawa’a, with their unkempt henna-dipped beards and three-quarter-length thobes, stalk women in public with their camel whips waving like an impatient predator’s tail, primed to pounce on the unsuspecting woman whose abaya has slipped from her head. The Wahhabi ulema define ‘woman’ as the personification of sin, there to sway the faithful Muslim male from his devotion to God and Islam by exposing tempting parts of her body before him. They believe it is their God-given duty not to allow this to happen except within the bounds of marriage. With the muttawa’a unleashed with such intensity, sex becomes S-E-X in Saudi Arabia and the muttawa’a, is its trigger. How can one refrain from desiring what is being denied by such absolute command?

  Thorough as the ulema are, a major act of one-upmanship has managed to slip from under their sharp noses and that is the name chosen for my hometown. ‘Dhahran’ means ‘two breasts’ in Saudi lingo. Geographically, the camp nestles cozily between two perfectly curved mound formations. The Saudi bachelor who thought of that name saw in Dhahran’s layout what he was forbidden to see otherwise … a consummate thumb-to-nose gesture by any standard.

  It was not until the late sixties that schools for girls were permitted and even then, the curriculum was limited: learning to read and write by studying the Wahhabi interpretation of the Koran. Our passports as females contained only our names and details of our legal guardian. Not even a mention of the color of our eyes or hair was permitted. And don’t even think about a signature. Female Saudi Arabs do not exist outside of the legal guardianship of the main male head of the family. A frustrated Interpol pressured the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to join the twentieth century in 1975 and get its female subjects photographed for their passports after female (and male, who would know?) members of organized crime began crisscrossing security barriers freely, needing only to wear a veil and flash a stolen Saudi woman’s passport. My mother, sister and I were forced to have our passport photos re-taken three times before the police would accept them because they were unhappy at the hint of a smile on our faces. The more traditional women had a difficult time uncovering their faces for fear of appearing wayward and insisted on being photographed wearing their black veils over their faces as well as around their heads.

  In such conservative families, segregation of the sexes is enforced among family members from the age of seven. Their women are covered from head to toe from the age of nine, and forbidden to communicate with any male outside of their immediate family. Girls’ schools have muttawa’a permanently stationed at their doors to make sure no girl enters or exits the premises uncovered or unchaperoned. This unrelenting surveillance has had tragic consequences. In 2002, a fire broke out in a girls’ school in Mecca resulting in the death of fifteen girls after the muttawa’a stationed outside their gates refused to allow them to escape or the firemen to enter because the heads of the frantically pleading girls were uncovered. That the Prophet Mohammed’s wife, Khadija, was a successful merchant that he met through trade is a detail lost on Wahhabi fundamentalists.

  Undoubtedly, King ‘Abdel ‘Aziz Ibn Al Sa’ud (or ‘Ibn Sa’ud’ as he was widely known), the conqueror of Saudi Arabia, was a powerful man of the desert who understood and shared the hearts and minds of the Bedouins. He was a kind man and well thought of by his people, described by those who met him as a man of indescribable charm. But sadly, as in the case of most self-made men, his success as a leader sprang from his life experiences, something he could not pass on to his progeny, forty-five sons and twenty-three daughters in total.

  While two of his eldest sons, Sa’ud and Faysal (who ascended the throne in 1953 and 1965 successively) had experienced a small amount of desert modus vivendi and fought battles for their father as young men, oil wealth from massive foreign investment and the Arab–Israeli conflicts came too soon and too fast for the sons to stand sturdily on their own merits. Rather than engage in the more difficult and drawn out process of dialogue with their people, they fell back on the easy path of oil dollars, the Wahhabi ulema, and American policy advisors within Aramco who whispered plots of potential conspiracies into their ears.

  Wahhabi Shari’a became a handy bully that pushed a work force for the oil producers into obedient shape by brutally stamping out any forms of dissent. And so it came to be that the acts of drinking alcohol or demonstrating for civil or labor rights are punished by public lashings and jail. Theft, including that of Aramco property, is punished by chopping off the right hand and left foot of the accused. Perpetrators of murder, drug trading, rape, and any threat against the Al Sa’uds are punished by cutting off the head of the accused. All punishments take place in a square behind the main mosque in a public extravaganza after Friday’s noon prayers. Women are shot or stoned lest the male Wahhabi executioner see their female bare necks before chopping them in half.

  For such extreme and archaic measures of punishment to remain in place not only in modern times but also in a member state of the United Nations that has a hefty oil income of $348 billion dollars per annum (and rising) raises hard questions about the double standards of justice and human rights. The Al Sa’uds allowed Shari’a to rein in not only Aramco’s labor dissent but also those political dissenters in the traditionally inimical and still simmering territories in Northern Saudi Arabia, Southern Saudi Arabia, Western Saudi Arabia, Eastern Saudi Arabia … and Northern parts of Central Arabia (the Al Sa’ud homeland).

  As a child on an illicit bicycle ride along the dusty road that ran parallel to Dhahran’s defining perimeter fence, I witnessed Wahhabi punishment at terrifyingly close range. It was strictly forbidden by company rules to go anywhere near the perimeter fence that ran close to our house where the asphalt street stopped and a narrow, rough, rock strewn path took over, disappearing around a curve in the distance. Far away on the fence’s other side, tiny figures of camels could be seen grazing on thistle bushes that survived the flat dusty terrain, attended by Bedouin herdsmen. The fence was ostensibly to keep them out.

  The large number of signs bearing the danger symbol of the skull and crossbones and Aramco’s security cars patrolling it round the clock gave the fence a particular aura of evil. One afternoon, I rode my bicycle there on a dare. And on that distant curve just visible from our house, very near to the Main Gate where it stopped, I saw a chilling sight. Atop the fence’s posts, waving ghoulishly in the hot humid air, I saw a
severed dark hand with dirt encrusted fingers and at my terrified eye level, a dismembered foot that swung uselessly at the end of a tattered rope. I gaped in open mouthed, voiceless, and worst of all, solitary horror at the palm turned upwards, frozen in a last unanswered plea for mercy and at rough shod toes popping out of a torn dusty shoe splayed in the last scream of anguish of their ex-owner. My knuckles turned white as I squeezed my bicycle’s handlebars in excruciating, paralyzing fear. My stomach churned, threatening to spill its contents. Far ahead I glimpsed the Aramco patrol car cresting the hill. I don’t recall how I scrambled onto my bicycle or outraced the security car in record speed to reach my impatiently awaiting friends. We shared the horror, but the secret stayed with us … children of that age know how to keep such secrets. None of us would ever dare to ask our fathers. We had broken a company rule and our fathers never broke any company rules.

  The dismembered limbs I saw belonged to a Saudi Arabian unfortunate, not invited to share in this rarefied piece of oil wealth heaven. His ex-hand and ex-foot were graphic warnings to the non-Aramco Saudis by order of the Emir of the Eastern Province, Sa’ud Ibn Jiluwi Al Sa’ud, of what befell those who tried to take what Aramco did not allow to be taken. There were no white American hands on that perimeter fence, or manicured fingers of Al Sa’ud royalty, or the fleshy, soft palms of their well-fed sycophants that illicitly rake in billions of dollars into their pockets … money that rightfully belongs in the national treasury for those Saudis whose hands and feet were left to rot on Aramco’s barbed wire perimeter fence.

  4

  Hidden America

  The Wahhabi movement that Ibn Sa’ud (1880–1953), first king of Saudi Arabia, was born into was founded by a theologian from central Arabia, Mohammed Ibn Abdel Wahhab. The theologian had teamed up with Ibn Sa’ud’s great-grandfather, Mohammed Ibn Al Sa’ud, in the late eighteenth century and together they had successfully spread both Ibn Abdel Wahhab’s puritan version of Islam and the Al Sa’uds’ realm of power over large parts of the Arabian Peninsula. Their glory lasted until the end of the nineteenth century when inter-family squabbles caused the Al Sa’uds to lose their conquests to the Ottoman’s protégé, the Al Rashid, who sent them into exile to Arabia’s then backwater in the Eastern Province.

  Ibn Sa’ud grew up in exile listening to stories of what the Al Sa’uds had once been. By the age of 21 in 1902, he had heard enough lamenting and vowed that he would be the one to regain his tribe’s lost glory. With the support of his brothers and cousins, he dusted off his great-grandfather’s battle strategy that had combined Wahhabi Islam and tribal politics and teamed up with the Ikhwan, militant, puritan offshoots of the Wahhabi movement who had given up the roaming Bedouin ways and had settled in exclusive agricultural settlements known as hujar. They referred to one another as ‘Brother,’ hence the name Ikhwan, which means ‘Brotherhood.’ Through his charisma and capacity as the son of the Imam of the Wahhabi, Ibn Sa’ud calculatingly stoked the Ikhwan’s fire of evangelist fervor to spread Islam in its unadorned pure form throughout Arabia and beyond by ridding Arabia of all moral corruption. 100,000 Ikhwan soon rallied behind Ibn Sa’ud in tightly organized fighting units, ready to drop their hoes and pick up their swords at his command. With their zeal to eradicate non-Wahhabi Muslims from Arabia, the Ikhwan became widely feared as the ‘thabaheen’ (throat slitters), as they struck terror amongst those Bedouins who did not share their desire for martyrdom.

  Bolstered with bags of silver sterlings from the British to support him in swaying Bedouin tribes to his side (and away from the Ottomans), and with the Ikhwan as his weapon for those who needed more persuasion, Ibn Sa’ud’s political war for the conquest of Arabia transformed into a powerful jihad against the ramshackle, hierarchial and fractious tribes of the Arabian Desert

  In 1928, Ibn Sa’ud declared his conquest of Arabia complete. He had promised the British, in return for their support of his campaign, that he would not challenge their rule over the protectorates of Jordan, Kuwait, and Iraq. Not so for his Ikhwan allies. They refused to lay down their arms and determinedly continued to push their jihad northwards into the forbidden territory which included the deserts of Iraq, Syria and Jordan up to the ‘Aqaba outlet on the Red Sea, territories bordering the British Empire’s troubled mandated territory of Palestine.

  Too late Ibn Sa’ud realized the double-edged sword that the Ikhwan had become within the heart of Arabia. They had spiraled out of his control, and were now a separate power-based entity with a separate agenda. He had initially viewed them only in terms of their usefulness to his dream to conquer Arabia, and for that had taught just the barest rudiments of religion necessary to maintain their single-minded zealotry, rather than Islam’s broader spiritual impact. Their lives revolved around blood, martyrdom and Paradise in their jihad for Islamic purity. Now their dreams were threatening his dreams.

  The Ikhwan were dedicated to ridding Arabia of immorality, which they associated with the presence and power of the imperialists. Ibn Sa’ud relied on the presence and power of the imperialists to defeat rival tribes in Arabia. The Ikhwan’s combative services were getting in his way. Managing to gain a fatwa from like-minded ‘ulema and backed by British support, he crushed their movement and by 1930 they were no longer a military power. As for their spiritual authority, Ibn Sa’ud eclipsed them by setting up his own Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice with handpicked cooperative ‘ulema ready to bend the rules to keep the Al Sa’ud in power … so long as the Al Sa’ud returned the favor.

  Saudi Arabia was declared a kingdom on September 23, 1932 by ‘Abdel ‘Aziz Ibn ‘Abdel Rahman Ibn Al Sa’ud, with only those of the Muslim faith accorded the nationality. Ibn Sa’ud named the conquered territory after his tribe, the Al Sa’ud. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia occupies eighty percent of the Arabian Peninsula, stretching from the Persian Gulf in the east and the Red Sea to the west, with borders (albeit troubled) along Yemen, Oman, the Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Jordan, and Iraq. We, the modern inhabitants of this part of the Arabian Peninsula, are born as subjects of the Al Sa’uds whether we belong to the Al Sa’ud tribe or not, or, more importantly, whether we care to be subjects or not. Our ‘independent nation state’ is a theocracy with no constitution except the words of the Qur’an, no separation of powers, no press outside of the official line, no elected parliament, no judicial independence, no separate identity for women, no recognition of residing non-Sunni sects like Shi’is and Ismailis. The new ruler consolidated power away from his brothers and cousins, who had helped him conquer the peninsula, by stipulating that only his sons were the rightful heirs to the crown after his death. Every Saudi Arabian king to date has been a son of ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Ibn Al Sa’ud.

  Oil and Dollars Soon after declaring his kingship, a severe drought gripped Saudi Arabia, erasing all revenue from taxes on dates, the main staple of trade in the kingdom. In addition to the drought, a recession gripped the world and affected the inflow of Hajj pilgrims, seriously reducing Saudi income. Ibn Sa’ud found himself ruling a vast, largely illiterate desert kingdom with no resources or income, and restive subjects who could only be silenced with material benefits.To add insult to injury, his previous paymasters, the British, had dropped him from their payroll after obtaining Palestine and its valuable port outlets. At this dire moment of need, the Americans stepped in with their timely bid for permission to explore and produce oil in Saudi Arabia. Ibn Sa’ud snapped up the offer. Just nine months into his kingship, the king signed an oil concession agreement with Standard Oil of California (SoCal).

  Representing SoCal were two Americans: Lloyd N. Hamilton, SoCal’s chief negotiator, a UCLA and Oxford University graduate and expert in contracts, who had served as a US infantry officer in France during the First World War, and Karl Twitchell, a mining engineer who was not only fluent in Arabic but also had already completed surveying the Arabian Desert (roughly the size of France), traveling with Bedouin tribes over an area of almost 515,000 square kilom
eters of uncharted barren desert. On the other side of the negotiating table was Saudi Arabia’s representative: Sheikh Abdullah Al Suleiman, King Abdel Aziz’s Finance Minister, who was there because he was literate. Before becoming the King’s right-hand man in legal and monetary affairs, Al Suleiman had worked as a clerk in India. The Saudi Arabian Finance Minister came to the negotiating table armed with knowledge of terms already won by Iraq and Iran for their oil concession contracts with the British Empire.

  Next to Sheikh Al Suleiman was the tin trunk that contained the Saudi Arabian national treasury. That day in May, the trunk was empty. Little wonder then that it took just three days for them to reach a sweeping concession beyond the expectations of both parties, allowing the United States to search for oil in Saudi Arabia.

  The fledgling Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the United States of America signed the first formal contract over oil exploration rights on May 29, 1933 at Khuzam Palace on the outskirts of Jeddah. Known as the ‘Concession Agreement,’ it was formally issued under Royal Decree Number 1135 on July 7, 1933 and officially proclaimed on July 14th of that year. SoCal was given exclusive rights to prospect and produce oil in the Eastern Province as well as preferential rights elsewhere in the Kingdom. In return, Ibn Sa’ud would receive royalties of $1.00 per ton of oil produced, loans of $50,000 yearly, a total of $170,000 in gold and annual rents of $25,000. At that point in time, these were riches beyond his wildest dreams and it was all he really cared to know about the contract. While the details of the concession were being read out in the formal signing ceremony, Ibn Sa’ud fell asleep.